04/14/10

Google are constantly changing their search algorithm ensuring that sites providing the best user experience appear at the top of the organic listings. Good content is key, backed up by relevant and authoritative inbound links. Obviously this is an over simplification and in fact there are at least two hundred boxes that need ticking to give your site every chance of appearing at the top of Google, but up until now site speed has not been one of them.

Google made us aware about a year ago that this metric would be added into their algorithm which was further backed up by them adding site performance into webmaster tools which shows how fast your site is compared to other sites. But they have recently made an official announcement on the Google Webmaster Central Blog that they are now including it in their search ranking algorithm.

There is a link within the site performance section of the webmaster tools to a Mozilla Firefox Plugin called Page Speed. Of course this isn’t the only tool available to measure site speed but it is the one that google are recommending and if you click on the help button it takes you to Googles help page so it would be fair to assume that this has been developed by them and as they are the ones that control the algorithm that this is a good tool for the job.

The loading speed of a site has always been important. In the days of dial up connections it was particularly relevant but with the advent of broadband it has been overlooked to a certain extent. But it should be remembered the speed of connections vary enormously especially between cities and the countryside and as more people are using mobile devices to access the web it is once again of the utmost relevance as anyone will know who has tried to access a slow site in an area without a 3G connection. If you combine this with the fact that the speed of your site may well cause you to drop down the search engine rankings then now is the time to optimise the speed of your website.

So don’t wait until your rankings drop because it will take you months to regain them if at all! If you would like any help with increasing the speed of your site then just contact us and we will be happy to help.